WEB WAR

5 years ago

Websites Protest Piracy Bills

Karen Bleier / Getty Images

With Wikipedia and several other websites set to go dark at midnight for 24 hours in protest of two Internet piracy bills—the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act—the online industry is on a collision course with Washington politics. A total of 115 companies and organizations, like media and tech giants like News Corporation and the Recording Industry Association of America, are currently spending millions of dollars to make sure the anti-piracy bills are passed. Meanwhile, others like Google and Facebook are more concerned about how their businesses will be affected. The tech industry argues that the laws will hurt the average Internet user by censoring the Internet—like the college student who uses Wikipedia as a research tool. The law would require that a website like Google—which will use its homepage to detail opposition against the bill—will be liable for hosting links to foreign sites that offers illegal copies of a film, for example.